Composer HE User Guide

Using external storage devices

You can access digital music from an external
storage device attached to your Control4®
system. External storage devices include USB Universal Serial Bus) - A format used with USB sticks that plug in to a USB port on Control4 devices. flash
drives, USB external hard drives, or a PC’s drive located on the home
network.

Using Composer HE, you can set up your external
storage device and networked file storage as described in this topic.

Note:
If you disconnect and remove the external drive (network-attached storage,
USB, etc.), the music is no longer available. To access the music again,
reattach and add the external storage device, and then refresh
the Navigators.

Prerequisites

Ensure that your external storage device
has been added to the Composer project and identified. Your dealer
or installer can help you do that.

External storage devices must have
media stored in unprotected MP3 A music format that makes streaming audio available.,
WMA, MP4, FLAC Supported by Control4 for software release 1.8, this is a free, open source, lossless audio codec format that supports tagging, cover art and fast seeking. Audio is compressed with no loss in quality.,
or AAC Advanced Audio Coding. A successor to the MP3 format. A standard, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Touts better sound quality. formats.

Procedures

To attach
and scan external storage devices using a USB connection:

Power on the external
storage device.

Use the documentation
provided with your controller The main device that makes Home Automation possible. There may be multiple Controllers within a Control4 system. The Controller that runs Director is referred to as the Primary Controller. to attach
the external storage device to the USB port.

When you connect the
external storage device, scan the music residing on that device so
that the music is available to the Control4 system.

Click the Media
view.

In the tree view,
select the external storage device.

Click Scan.
The media residing on the external storage device is available in
the Control4 system.

Note:
You can add media from the external storage device when connected to the
controller. However, it is recommended that you connect your external
drive directly to the PC where you want to copy the media.

When scanning, the media appears when it
is located on the controller.

To access and scan network
storage devices:

Select
the Network File Storage object.

Note:
A network storage device must be configured by your dealer or installer
using Composer Pro before you can scan it for media on Composer HE.

Click Add
or Scan. Note:
If your network storage device contains copies of songs and albums,
it will scan those also (see below). Ensure that your storage only
has one original of the albums and songs or you'll need to delete
the duplicates manually in Composer.